


Flashlight

by Mishiman



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Depression, Dreams, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Recovery, Yusuke is ace, brief references to suicide, don't let the tags scare you this is actually fluffy, mental health, non-canon Metaverse powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-13 16:11:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18034874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mishiman/pseuds/Mishiman
Summary: No one can get you out of that hole but you, but that doesn't mean they can't try to help.





	Flashlight

It was quiet enough in the middle of the day that Futaba could hear the sound of the key unlocking the front door, even from all the way down the hall and inside her bedroom with the door closed.

 

“I don’t want any!” she yelled, not bothering to lift her head from her pillow. Sojiro would know what she’d said anyway, since she said the exact same thing every time he came home in the afternoon. If he came home during what _should_ be business hours at Leblanc, that meant he was going to hang around outside her bedroom door for a good five or ten minutes in an attempt to convince her to eat some curry. When she made it clear that she wouldn’t change her mind, he’d heave a big, sad dog sigh, give up, and stick it in the fridge for her before heading back to the cafe.

 

She grimaced. Things were getting to be just a bit too close to the way she’d been last year, and the year before that. It all felt a little too familiar.

 

When she thought of it that way, she tried to remind herself of the fact that she could actually go outside now, on the days when she wasn’t like this. When she had to, like for school, or for quick fetch quests to the market down the street. Sometimes she even wanted to, like when Haru invited her out to be fancy with her. But over the last few days, things were starting to get scary close to when she’d been at her worst.

 

It felt sort of like being in a great big hole in the dirt with steep, crumbling sides. Easy to get in, but a lot harder to get out.

 

There were footsteps outside her door, almost too quiet for her to hear them, and then, without warning, the knob started to turn, slow but unstoppable, like in a horror movie - she could have locked it, _why didn’t she lock it -_

 

She squawked, “Don’t come in!” and swept her arm across the top of her bed frantically, trying to get all of her snotty kleenexes into her trash can in one fell swoop. Two of them evaded her attack and found a good hiding spot under her bed, and she probably could have reached them if she’d tried, but the door was already opening. She would just have to challenge them another day.

 

“I _said_ don’t come in!” She glared up at Sojiro, fuming and prepared to tear a strip off of him, but even with the lights out and with her glasses off she could tell it wasn’t him. That walking coat rack was unmistakable. “Oh. I, uh. I forgot you had a key.”

 

Yusuke padded into her room in his sockfeet like he owned the place. Like he’d been invited. Which was absolutely _not_ the case. “It’s a good thing that you don’t want any.”

 

“Wha?”

 

“Since I didn’t bring you anything,” he added helpfully.

 

“Uh. Right.”

 

Way too late, she remembered what she must look like and swiped both eyes with the backs of her wrists, trying to be sneaky about it until she remembered who it was in her room and stopped, feeling stupid. Yusuke was Yusuke. He didn’t pick up on stuff like that. She inspected her glasses, all salt speckly with dried tears, and put them back on to see him properly.

 

He was still just standing in the middle of her room, not even pretending to look at anything but her.

 

“Inari, I _know_ you know how to knock. I even saw you do it once, out in the wild.”

 

Now he came a little closer, and she just barely had time to move her feet out of the way before he sat down at the end of her bed. Good thing, too, since she knew from experience how bony his ass was. He raised an eyebrow and put on that serene expression that got under her skin so well. The one he always put on before he gave her some Inari brand snark. “I apologize. I wasn’t aware you had such a full schedule today.”

 

“That’s not the point and _you know it -_ I could’ve, I could’ve been _naked - “_

 

The fact that his expression didn’t budge told her just how much the prospect of her being naked phased him. In other words, not one bit.

 

She was fighting a losing battle and decided to throw in the towel. “Urrrgh, fine!” she growled. “What? What is it?! Why’re you here? It’s like, Wednesday - you don’t go to school anymore, or what?”

 

He didn’t say a word for a long time, just staring at her instead. She was bad at eye contact and he was way too good at it - another battle she usually lost - so she yanked off her glasses again and fwumped her head back into her pillow hard enough to make her stringy hair fly around her face.

 

He finally answered her. “It’s well past four. And today is Thursday.”

 

She was the one who didn’t go to school anymore, lately anyway, but Yusuke had apparently decided that that was obvious enough that even he didn’t need to say it. She grimaced and flipped over onto her side, burrowing her face as far into the pillow as she could.

 

“Sojiro asked you to come, didn’t he,” she grumbled directly into it.

 

“Hardly. I came of my own volition.”

 

Now that was different. Usually she had to pry him out of his dorm room with a crowbar to get him to come with her to do anything that she couldn’t spin as art related. In fact she could count on one hand the number of times he’d been in her room since she’d threatened him with dismemberment for treating her figures with such gross disrespect.

 

And when she peeped at him over her shoulder in the near dark, she confirmed what she’d originally thought: no sketchbook. So he wasn’t here for art.

 

He could’ve left it in his bag by the door, of course, but, for right now, at least, it looked like he was giving her his full attention.

 

It made her want to squirm and curl up like a bug. She didn’t want _anyone’s_ full attention, not really, not in anything more than short bursts that she could summon and then dismiss when she was sick of it, but his especially felt like being strapped down underneath a bad guy’s laserbeam. She huffed and resigned herself to it, staring straight ahead at the back of her wheelie chair a few feet away. “What.”

 

“I dreamt of you last night.”

 

God, he was weird. That would sound like a bad pickup line from anybody else, but from him it just meant… that. That he’d had a dream about her. That he’d hustled his scrawny butt the whole way here the second classes let out at Kosei just so he could tell her all about it in person.

 

“Good dream or bad dream?” she demanded.

 

“Mm… “ he said, thinking, and as he did, he stood up again and twisted his back from side to side until it crackled like a mouthful of pop rocks. “Neither good nor bad, I think. Yours?”

 

“I never even said I - “ But she’d had a dream last night too, and he knew it, and he just let her stew in that while he first knelt on the floor, then stretched out flat and wriggled himself right under her bed. She peered over the edge just in time to see his foot and his hand disappear from view.

 

Ugh. Who knew what kind of snotties and dust bunnies and _worse_ were under there? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually hauled out a broom and swept, and whenever it had been, she figured she probably hadn’t been real meticulous when it came to the underside of her bed. That was no man’s land. “Uh. You okay under there?”

 

“Of course.”

 

She was still pissed at him, a little, so she dropped the solicitous hostess act and went back to the dream thing. He was a big boy. He could handle some dust. “What was yours about?”

 

When he talked, his voice came out deep as ever but muffled, too, and if she laid on her back, it could have been coming from inside her own head, lined up as he was directly underneath her. If anything, it was a little like when he’d still been Fox and she’d still been Oracle, strategizing and trading insults from a distance without ever opening their mouths. Psychic communication, or something like it. It had been nice. It had been _easy._ It was hard for her to get two words out in the right order, some days, but Oracle had never, ever stammered, not once.

 

So she let him paint her a picture - ha ha, you’re so funny, Futaba - and closed her eyes.

 

“Last night, I dreamt I was a white owl, flying over a vast forest beneath the stars. Snow covered the ground in slopes and dunes, but only in patches. Perhaps it had partially melted when the sun was still up. It was deep in some places, in the shadows of the trees, and absent in others, left behind in a pattern like lace over the earth. I sketched it this morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, but I’m certain some subtlety was lost in the moments between sleep and wakefulness.”

 

“Boring dream if you ask me.” She was just being snippy at this point, she admitted to herself. Flying dreams were fun. They just didn’t sound like much when you described them.

 

He kept going like he hadn’t heard her. Maybe he really couldn’t hear her with the bed in the way. “I soared, silent and alone, for what felt like hours until I came upon a clearing in the forest, and in the centre of the clearing was a light. A warm, comforting light. I was drawn to it, and so without giving it a second thought I tipped my wing to wheel down to it in smaller and smaller circles.”

 

“A fire?” She made it sound like a guess, not because she really needed to guess but because some part of her always had to drag things out for as long as she possibly could. The stubborn part of her, probably, though the part of her that liked the sound of Yusuke’s voice but would never, ever tell him that might have had something to do with it too.

 

“A fire,” he agreed. So he could hear her, then. “You were only wearing the clothes you always do, the ones you often wear at home, but you did not seem at all uncomfortable, seated there in the snow.”

 

The jig was up. She gave up on pretending. “Yeah. Not the most realistic dream. My butt didn’t even feel wet.”

 

“It felt very real to me.” The tone of his voice changed, losing a little of his usual ironclad certainty. “Well. Perhaps not. I approached, and approached, and approached, but in truth I drew no closer. The fire and the people seated around it remained out of reach well past the point of believability. I was fixed in place.”

 

“How do you even know you were an owl? Oh - unless you flew over a pond and saw yourself that way, I guess.”

 

He sniffed with disdain, a sound that turned into a cough. Maybe he’d sucked in a good lungful of underbed dust. It was his own fault if he had. She refused to feel bad about it. “As I’ve told you before, I often see myself in my dreams. My vantage point was from both inside and outside the owl.”

 

It wasn’t fair. She was the one who’d had access to all those cameras when she’d still been Oracle, zipping around inside first Necronomicon and then Prometheus. But it was Yusuke who got multiple camera angles and cinematic flying dreams. A snazzy owl body. She never got a break from herself, even in dreams. She was always just Futaba. It got old.

 

She wasn’t mad at him, not really, or if she was, it was only because she was mad at… everything. Everything outside and everything inside, too. But her voice came out harsher than it needed to be anyway. “I figured you were a drone or something.”

 

“Now _that_ would truly be a boring dream.”

 

Fair was fair. He was just needling her back now. She ignored the pitiful attempt to annoy her and went on. “I - I couldn’t turn my head to get a good look at you, I guess. I kept trying to, but I could only see you out of the corner of my eye. Sojiro and Akira and - I dunno, some other people, people I liked, whoever they were - were all talking to me and I couldn’t keep track.” That wasn’t how she’d felt at _all,_ though. She growled in frustration at herself. Talking was impossible. “Like, it wasn’t _bad._ No, it was bad. Kind of. I felt bad. Everyone was being nice but they were all talking at the same time, and, like… “ She abandoned that trail and went down a different one. “The fire was too hot, too, but I couldn’t get away.”

 

“I felt no discomfort. I suppose I must have been well suited to the cold. Though, comfortable or not, I was drawn to the fire long before I recognized you.” And then he said another thing that would have sounded like some kind of one liner out of anyone else’s mouth. Forced and fake. Coming from him, it just sounded like a fact. “Your hair is a lovely colour by firelight.”

 

She rolled her eyes for no one but herself. “Oh, shut up.”

 

“Perhaps if we had slept longer, we might have met,” he said wistfully.

 

“We’re - we’re meeting _now,_ we’re in the same freaking _room,_ Inari - “

 

He ignored her and her pesky logic, as he so often did. “Have we ever successfully met? In our dreams?”

 

“Nope. You’re usually just the scarecrow in the distance.”

 

“If only you could keep the schedule of a human being, we might finally rendezvous properly and speak with one another. Dreaming can only occur when one enters REM sleep, meaning that - “

 

She’d heard him bitch and moan about this several times before. “Yeah, yeah. Who says we have to be asleep at the same time? You don’t know how it works. You’re not the - the dream expert.”

 

Even he couldn’t argue with that. He went quiet for a good minute or two, and it gave her time to fall back into the miserable grind of the type of thoughts that had kept her in her room for almost a week.

 

Last year, before she’d met the Thieves, it had been a track stuck on an endless loop. You killed your mom, and she hated you anyways, and you’ll die in this room, and you deserve to, because you killed your mom. You killed your mom, and she hated you anyways, and -

 

And then the Thieves had saved her, they’d taken her heart, but -

 

But it didn’t end there. They’d saved her, but she hadn’t saved herself. Her Palace had crumbled, but apparently her heart had needed more work than that.

 

Sojiro had helped, in that forever patient, forever yielding way that she now knew was half good, half bad for her. It was too easy to tell him tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, and he’d just accept it, until the school called home, again, and he pleaded with her to go, again.

 

Akira had helped, and she’d completed her promise list with him. The Thieves had helped, and by now it felt like she’d seen half of Tokyo with them.

 

Baby steps, Futaba, Makoto would say, and Akira would laugh and make some kind of dopey comment, asking her what baby would like for din-din, and then they’d pretend to argue about it until she’d forgotten all about whatever had freaked her out so bad in the first place.

 

Then, after they’d saved Japan - the world! - she’d felt good enough to go to school. And for the first few months, it had been _great._

 

Well, no. The first day had sucked. There was no sugarcoating it. She’d felt like they’d all been staring at her, and after the teacher had made everyone introduce themselves to the class, she’d known for a fact that they were. It was her quavery voice, or maybe her scorching red face. It had kept happening, too, every time she’d so much as opened her mouth, and then, during the morning break, a group of kids in her class had started to ask her questions. Mean questions.

 

But she’d fired back, as good as she got, and it was glorious. All the time she’d spent picking on Yusuke and Akira and Ryuji had only honed her blade, and when push came to shove, her voice hadn’t quavered. She hadn’t gone red, either. She’d laid into them viciously, one after the other, and after that, the rest of the kids in her class only asked her nice questions about anime, and the pet cat that she kinda sorta had, and her hair.

 

And at lunch, she got to see Ann and Ryuji, her two favourite dumb blondes, and it was like a taste of old times in the middle of her boring school day. Her refuge, an oasis where she could be herself, before she had to go back to pretending to be a normie in history class.

 

For a long time, months and months, it had been enough.

 

She couldn’t really say when it had started to get so hard again. It had happened gradually enough that there was no way she could’ve marked it off on a calendar or anything like that. And there didn’t seem to have been a cause, either. She and Sojiro could still talk about her mom, now and then, and her homework was easy. It wasn’t like anything bad had happened. But somehow the world had narrowed in on her, a little more each day, and she’d stopped volunteering to pick up Leblanc’s groceries from the market down the street.

 

That was the first sign she could point to. It was harder to go outside than it was to stay inside, where only Sojiro could look at her, so in the evenings, after school, she stayed home. Nobody could stare at her if she just stayed in her room. And it was probably easier on Sojiro if he didn’t have to hear all about how weird she was from the neighbours.

 

Then she’d stopped texting Akira first every night. There were days when he was too busy somewhere out there in the countryside to text her first, too, so nobody texted anybody and she used that against herself like it was what she was made to do. Akira didn’t want to hear from her anyway. He was busy, and she was just a burden. Really, if she kept her mouth shut, she’d be doing him a favour.

 

Then she’d stopped going to school again, just like last year, when she’d grown a whole pyramid out of bad thoughts and thin air. But this time, Sojiro took her to see Dr. Goth down the street.

 

The medicine had helped. The side effects were annoying to bad to very bad, _dangerous_ bad, but she’d made herself talk to him about it, and he’d listened, and they’d tried again until the worst she’d had to put up with was a dry mouth and some trouble getting to sleep. And even that got better. She’d finally started feeling like a person again, so she’d gone back to school and, as a surprise reward, Sojiro had invited Akira over for Golden Week. They’d gone down to the ocean, just the three of them this time, and even now, her lock screen was a blurry photo of Akira with his hair full of sand and one of his eyes half closed.

 

Things were good again, for a while, until they weren’t. Bad girl, Futaba. Back in the hole with you. It had gotten so bad now that trying to think of the better times just backfired on her and made her regret ever having tried in the first place. Her brain could twist any little thing into a weapon, a reason for Sojiro or Akira or the Thieves to hate her or, worse, pity her, so she stopped trying to think of the better times.

 

She wished she could just stop thinking, period.

 

It wasn’t like she wanted off the ride, or whatever. She didn’t want to hurt anybody, including herself. But sometimes she just wanted… silence. A break. Maybe a long break. Some way to turn off the noise.

 

When Yusuke finally did open his mouth again, she strained her ears to hear him. Any lame jab he tried to take at her would feel nicer than what her own brain kept trying to do to her.

 

“Do you suppose any of the other Thieves catch glimpses of each other in this way?”

 

“What?”

 

“While dreaming.”

 

“No, I mean. I can’t hear you,” she lied. “Come talk out here like a normal person.”

 

Apparently it was harder to get out from under the bed. She heard a lot of rustling and a little grunting, plus a gasp as he whanged his knee or something off of the bedframe and shook the entire bed. When he flung out his hand and clutched a handful of her covers like the world’s least scary under-the-bed monster, she gave him room to grab on and waited patiently for the rest of him to appear.

 

“Why’d you want under there so bad, anyway? Painting reference?”

 

Oh god. He finally stood upright, and even in the gloom of her bedroom she could see that his school clothes were streaked grey with dust and who knew what else. A small family of dustbunnies had taken up residence in his hair, too. She clamped her mouth shut and said absolutely nothing.

 

“At times a change in perspective grants new - “

 

He was coming closer and closer as he droned on, and she had no choice but to interrupt him to keep him from getting the underbed denizens all over her blanket. “Uh huh. Yeah, that makes sense. You just wanted to stretch your back, right?”

 

“A welcome bonus,” he agreed.

 

She couldn’t figure out a way around it. She’d have to invite him outright. She twisted her mouth and patted the space on the bed behind her, between herself and the wall. “Go like this first, though.” She got up on one elbow so she could demonstrate, waggling both her hands in the air on either side of her head to mime getting the dustbunnies out.

 

He was so _prissy_ though. He didn’t want to mess up his prettyboy hair, so he stood there and wasted a minute or two carefully combing his fingers through it, plucking out each fuzzy one by one and letting them drift to the floor. Then he got onto the bed on his hands and knees and started to clamber over her feet until she booted him in the leg through the covers.

 

“Permissions revoked!” She grinned, feeling rusty and out of practice. But it felt good to laugh at him. “Sorry. You can’t just make like a human Swiffer and then get it all in my bed. You better strip.”

 

One day she’d catch him off guard. One day. He just glanced down at his dusty self, shrugged, and got out of his nice white shirt and black uniform pants, folding them up and hanging them over the back of her chair. Then, wearing just his boring black socks and undies, he crawled into bed with her.

 

At least he didn’t make her ask for a hug. This time. He settled in behind her under the covers and pulled her in close, folding one arm around her middle and drawing his legs up until she felt small and safe. Wrapped up tight like a gachapon prize. She sighed.

 

“Do you suppose any of the other Thieves catch glimpses of each other? In dreams?” he repeated in her ear, like no time had passed at all.

 

Getting what she wanted without having to ask for it for once - with words, at least - made her magnanimous. She decided to humour him by digging into his favourite topic some more. “They might. We don’t tell them, so maybe they all meet up in their dreams like crazy and they just don’t tell us, either.”

 

“Mm.” Apparently that answer wasn’t good enough for him. “I feel that Ryuji or Ann would have mentioned it to you in passing were it something that they had experienced themselves.”

 

“What makes you say that?”

 

“You have told me in the past that they spend their lunch breaks with you.”

 

“Sure, but - “

 

“And they are the open type.”

 

“Well. Yeah.” That was unusually diplomatic, for him. She wanted to stay strong and argue some more, but memories of Ryuji telling her about every conceivable bodily function, and Ann telling her in exhaustive detail about both the things she ate and the things she wished she were eating, were making it difficult. Now that she thought about it, they’d each told her about dreams they’d had in the past, too, especially if they were funny or if they’d featured anything from the Metaverse. If Ann and Ryuji ever met up in the same dream like she and Yusuke did, they probably would have told her, she had to admit.

 

She thought of them at Shujin, eating their lunch every day without her, and blinked away tears without knowing why.

 

“Okay, fine,” she blurted out. “We can probably rule them out, at least. They tell me everything. More than I ever really wanna know, at least. But we don’t know about everybody else.”

 

“I have a theory,” he declared. Like he was playing scientist instead of artist for a change.

 

“What?”

 

“Our shared dreams are linked to the Metaverse.”

 

She kept waiting for more until it was clear that there wasn’t going to be any. She snorted. “That doesn’t really narrow it down, Inari.” Some theory. “And the Metaverse is gone. I’m the navigator. Was. I should know.”

 

“Some traces remain,” he insisted. “Susano-o speaks to me, at times.”

 

“That’s just your conscience or whatever,” she said, pretending like she didn’t know exactly what he meant. Prometheus spoke to her too, of course. It was her and not her at the same time, a comfort and an annoyance and a distraction and a guide, all at once. She couldn’t make it come out where anyone else could see it, anymore, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still there.

 

He lay motionless behind her, breathing slow and deep as he thought, and she felt a brief pang of gratitude that he’d come to see her. She buried it again as soon as she’d registered it.

 

He sounded sort of contemplative now. Figuring things out as he said them, which was unusual for him. “Akira told me once that every one of his Personas dissipated along with the Metaverse. It was near instantaneous. He compared it to a light switch.”

 

On one second, off the next. That sounded sort of horrible. No time for goodbyes. She didn’t want to think of what it would be like to lose Prometheus for good.

 

This was getting to be like a real mystery, and it was interesting enough that she kept forgetting to be annoyed at Yusuke. Whatever. Maybe she could give him a pass, just for today. “You think this is a me and you thing too? Our Personas? I don’t get why we’re so special though. And - and this really might be a thing that they just don’t bring up. Everybody else, I mean. Like, Akira’s are gone, but that doesn’t mean everybody else’s are just because they don’t talk about it.” Personas felt even more, well, personal than shared dreams did. It would make sense if even Ryuji and Ann kept it to themselves.

 

“I have a theory,” he said again.

 

This time she laughed outright. An ugly laugh, but who cared. “Okay. Tell me your theory.”

 

“When you think of the two of us, what first comes to mind? What do we have in common?”

 

Uh. Not a lot. Ryuji had once said that she and Yusuke standing next to each other looked like a comedy duo on TV, one of the ones that were just as likely to prank people on a gameshow as they were to whip out foam bats to hit each other with, but that probably wasn’t what Yusuke was going for. “We both… like… curry?”

 

He made a disgusted sound in her ear, and she smiled.

 

“We’re both skinny, I guess.”

 

“How you managed to navigate us through the Metaverse for all those months, I will never know,” he scolded. “Think harder. Think back to your Palace.”

 

If he only knew how long she’d been stuck on that, he wouldn’t bring it up like it was nothing. She knew he wasn’t trying to be mean. But her brain glommed onto it like a dog with a stick anyway, and she grit her teeth as she relived what it was like to be trapped in that nasty loop. You killed your mom, and she hated you anyways, and -

 

She didn’t really believe it anymore. That part was gone, at least. She had a broken brain, sure, but the Thieves had helped her uncover the facts surrounding her mom’s faked suicide note, and now that Sojiro knew a little about what had happened, he tried hard to keep reminding her of how things had really been while her mom had been alive. There’d been times when she’d felt ignored while her mom had been knee deep in work, sure, but there’d also been trips, and movie nights, and entire days, beginning to end, when her mom had given her all of her attention.

 

She didn’t hallucinate anymore. That was good, too. And she knew now that her mom had loved her, for sure, no matter what the dicks in suits and her monster relatives had told her. But her brain could sure reminisce about the bad times like a champ.

 

Her pillow was yucky and freshly wet all over again beneath her face, so she flipped it over. Yusuke released her until she’d settled back in, then grabbed her even tighter than he had before, tight enough that she thought she could feel his ribcage against her back. When he spoke up again, his voice was a little gentler.

 

“I meant that we have something related to your Palace in common.”

 

Ugh. He really wasn’t going to just tell her. He was going to make her figure it out for herself. It felt like she was trying to read through waxed paper now that she was asking her brain to do something more constructive than beat herself up all day.

 

Hmm. Her Palace had been ancient Egyptian themed, so - “Uh... oh!” She grinned suddenly, delighted. Yusuke was weird, but sometimes he knew just how to cheer her up. “Is this the mummy brown thing you were telling me about again? I can’t believe they used to use dead people as paint. That’s so crazy. Wait, ‘in common’ - you don’t _still_ use that stuff, do you?! Dead people paint?!” God, he sometimes stuck his brushes in his mouth, she’d seen him do it -

 

He sighed like a disappointed teacher, but he moved his hand against her stomach through her tshirt at the same time. A consolation pat. “No, I wasn’t referring to mummy brown paint.”

 

She hated admitting she didn’t know something around him. It felt wrong. But she supposed there was a first time for everything. “Just tell me.”

 

He was _so_ stubborn. “Where do you sleep?” he hinted.

 

“Uh, my bed. Here.”

 

“And where do I sleep?”

 

“Usually your bed in the dorm, I figure, except for that time you fell asleep on the train for like three hours and wound up at the train garage… thingy - the depot place - “

 

This time he actually made a frustrated sound at her, an Inari growl, and it was satisfying enough to make her laugh. Fine. She was glad he came. She could admit it.

 

“Perhaps I should rephrase the question,” he allowed. “Last year, when we could still access the Metaverse, I slept in… ?”

 

The answer was still his bed in his dorm room, unless he meant before - “Oh, the shack! Right? Right?” He started to answer her, but she cut him off. “Geeze, Inari. I wasn’t even around yet, so I dunno why you’d expect me to get your quiz question right.”

 

He’d told her about how things had been back then, though. When he’d still lived with Madarame, back before he’d ever met the Phantom Thieves. Just the surface level of it at first, a wireframe of the facts, until the two of them had started hanging out without the other Thieves around and had gotten a little closer. Then, in his dorm room, on a grey sort of day when their park plans had been rained out unexpectedly, he’d laid it all out for her. One awful thing after another, delivered in a dull robot voice that had gotten to her more and more as he’d talked until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

 

He should have been _mad._ He should have been yelling, or at least frowning. Maybe even crying, though she found that impossible to picture for some reason. But he hadn’t done any of those things, so she’d gotten mad and yelled about it for him.

 

Not long after that, she’d started to dream of not only the shack but of the museum, too. Madarame’s Palace, a place she’d never been. She’d chalked it up to having an overactive imagination until it had happened enough times that she’d brought it up with him. Just an offhand comment while they’d been hanging out in a booth at Leblanc. No big deal. She’d expected him to make some kind of arty reference to a dead guy, somebody who painted dreams, maybe, but instead he’d just dug out his phone and shown her a bunch of photos of his sketches.

 

That ugly gold statue had been in her dream. Those banners with Madarame’s face on them, too. He’d even drawn the outside of the museum, spotlights and all, and the fact that he’d never described any of that stuff to her before her dream gave her the creeps badly enough that she’d escaped the encounter and sprinted home, leaving him there all alone.

 

It was probably a good thing that he’d waited until later to tell her that he’d actually _seen_ her there, wandering around the big empty museum like a lost tourist.

 

He was talking again, his voice low and rumbly behind her head. She tuned back in. “ - recap. If you and I are the only two Thieves who share dreams, and we are also the only two Thieves who have retained their Personas, then… ?” She was still tying up all the loose threads, so he went on without her. “And if your bedroom became the pyramid in the cognitive world, your Palace, then we can assume - “

 

“Ohhh… “ It all clicked into place, like when you snapped two pieces of a plastic model together. Satisfying. “The _shack!_ Your bedroom! _My_ bedroom! We - sleeping must’ve - “

 

He laughed with his mouth closed, that smug ‘hmm-hmm’ thing he did, but she decided to let him have it this time. He’d earned it. This whole thing was making her head spin. She was convinced that he was on to something, but that wasn’t enough to stop her from looking for ways to pick it apart immediately.

 

“Okay, but - the others - the other Palaces - “ She started to rattle them off. “Kamoshida’s was really - “

 

“Shujin. A school, one without a dormitory. No one slept there.”

 

“And Okumura’s was a - it was Okumura Foods HQ, so nobody slept _there,_ and - and Makoto’s sister’s was the courthouse, so - “

 

“And Shido’s cruise ship was the Diet building,” he finished. “We must conclude that sleeping within the physical structure linked to a cognitive Palace, especially for a protracted length of time, has linked _us_ in some way. We share dreams, and our Personas remain.”

 

“Hold on, hold on,” she argued. “You missed one.” Half of this was before her time. She wracked her brain until she remembered that the Thieves had saved Makoto after Yusuke. “Kaneshiro’s was - oh.” She felt disappointed. It had been fun while it had lasted, but she’d unravelled it in no time at all. “Kaneshiro’s bank was all of _Shibuya._ Tons of people sleep there! What, do they all share dreams, too?”

 

“ ...oh.” He sounded just as disappointed, and somehow it made her want to prove him right for once instead of tearing his argument apart like she always did. So she put her mind to work until she’d come up with a theory herself.

 

“Maybe it needs the personal connection, too,” she said, eventually. “Shibuya’s just full of NPCs to Kaneshiro, right? From what you guys told me? He doesn’t give a shit about any of ‘em. Or he didn’t before you all took his heart, at least.”

 

“You have been spending too much time with Ryuji.”

 

“Did you even hear what I said?!”

 

“Yes. Continue.”

 

She gathered up the puzzle pieces again. “So like. If Kaneshiro’s just got nobodies filling up his - whatever you call it, the real world place where his Palace was linked to, then your theory still works for you and me. Right? My Palace was linked to my bedroom, and it was about… me. Me and my mom, I guess. And the museum wasn’t _you,_ it wasn’t _your_ Palace, but it was still linked to the place where you slept, and… “

 

“My father,” he agreed. Sometimes he called him that and sometimes he called him Madarame, and she still couldn’t guess which it was going to be on any given day. It sort of bugged her, actually, that an abusive asshole like him got to be called that, a dad, when he hadn’t acted like one at all. But it wasn’t up to her, so she kept her mouth shut.

 

Yusuke fell quiet, and she couldn’t figure out what he was thinking of or how he was feeling. It’d be just like her if he’d come over to cheer her up - _was_ that what he’d come over for? - only for her to drag him down into the hole with her instead. “So, uh. Did we solve it? The mystery?” she asked, just for the sake of getting him talking again.

 

He ignored her and exhaled into her hair, a long sigh that went on for ages. “Futaba. May I see you?”

 

He almost never said her name. And he definitely never asked for anything nicely when he could be rude instead. She rolled over, not sure of where this was going, and froze when he kissed her.

 

So it was _that_ kind of visit.

 

Most of the time they spent together wasn’t like that. They’d grown closer and closer without things ever going down that road, the one she’d been googling and daydreaming about for years already, and at first she’d taken it hard. Every catty comment he’d ever made about how loud she was, or her lack of grace, or the fact that she didn’t have the curves to fill out Ann’s Panther catsuit had all come home to roost, and she’d cried her eyes out.

 

Of course he didn’t want that from her. Kissing and all the stuff that came after it. Who would? She didn’t have what Ann had to offer. Or Akira, for that matter, if she’d gotten even that part wrong.

 

It was one-sided, then. She’d misunderstood. Yusuke must’ve had somebody at Kosei, somebody who understood all his art talk. Somebody who was brave enough to fill up the long, awkward silences with him, the silences that were all she’d been able to manage as her mind raced, trying to figure out if she should risk grabbing his hand whenever they were alone together.

 

After that, she’d started turning him down every time he’d asked to come over, and when he’d started showing up anyway, she’d pretended she couldn’t hear him. Let him stand on her doorstep and knock all day if he wanted. People’d just think he was trying to sell cleaning solution, or hand out religious tracts, she’d figured. She hadn’t counted on him swinging himself up onto the roof of her house like a freaking monkey and tapping on the skylight until she’d finally found something to stand on so she could open it and let him in.

 

He’d collapsed on the floor of her hallway, his spaghetti arms quivering with overexertion, and after he’d gotten his breath back enough to sit up, they’d had a long talk.

 

It _wasn’t_ one-sided. Not exactly. He wanted the gist of what she did, at least. He’d kissed her at the end of their talk on the floor of the hallway, and even though her heart had threatened to pop right out, she’d also been so, so happy.

 

Now, her lips were all dry and chewed up, but it didn’t seem to matter. He kissed her, soft and sweet and not the least bit pushy, and she was finally able to turn her brain off. She didn’t think of one bad thing for the entire kiss. In fact, she didn’t think of anything at all. It was bliss.

 

She wouldn’t be herself if she didn’t find a way to wreck it, though. She pulled back an inch or two. “W-what about. Um. When you were inside the pyramid?”

 

Even in the dark, he was close enough that she could see his expression. Not the least bit annoyed to be interrupted, because he was just as happy talking about weird dreams with her as he was kissing her. He kept his face there, so close she could feel his breath on her neck, and thought about it like he had all the time in the world. “Do you mean to ask, did I dream of you while we infiltrated your Palace?” he finally asked.

 

“Yeah,” she whispered.

 

“No, not at all. I didn’t think much of you back then.” She couldn’t tell if he meant that he hadn’t thought of her often or if he meant that he’d had a low opinion of her. Probably both. Then his eyebrows went up as a new thought occurred to him. “Tell me. What was it like? To be the Palace owner.”

 

“Uh. Bad.” Did he really want the whole rundown? She’s already gone over some of the stuff about her mom with him, in addition to everything the Thieves had all seen firsthand. The idea of dragging it out with him all over again felt... exhausting. Right now she felt about as strong as a wet paper bag.

 

Fortunately for her, that didn’t seem to be what he’d meant. “Not that. Were there signs that we were infiltrating, for example? I understand that your Shadow and yourself were not one and the same, but - ah. Did we appear in _your_ dreams? Or were there physical sensations, perhaps?”

 

He’d set her up _perfectly._ He heart soared with the pure and simple satisfaction of a dirty joke even as she struggled to keep from laughing too soon. “Oh, uh. You’re asking what it f-felt like to have you inside me?”

 

“Yes, after a fashion - “

 

“P-pretty good, actually - “ was all she got out before she started sputtering, laughing hysterically just an inch or two from his face. She laughed more than the joke deserved - it wasn’t _that_ funny - but the face he was making kept giving her fuel to keep going.

 

It felt so good to laugh.

 

He closed in to kiss her again, probably just so she couldn’t laugh at him anymore, until he was the one to pull away. “Would that help you?” he murmured.

 

She knew he meant just his fingers, though.

 

This had been the subject of another giant blowup, of course, back when they’d still been figuring things out. Stomping, crying, chilly silences. Days and days of it.

 

If he could _kiss_ her, then there was supposed to be more. That was how it was supposed to go. If he wanted to _be with her,_ like he’d said he did when she’d finally wrung an answer out of him after months and months of waiting for him to act first, then there was supposed to be…

 

But even when she was functioning like a real person, somebody who’d been born with a good brain, somebody who had no idea what it felt like to be deep down in the hole with the steep, crumbling sides, she still didn’t always act the way she was supposed to. She was just herself. Futaba.

 

On an afternoon that she had spent huddled in his dorm room bed, an angry, blubbering, self-loathing mess, Yusuke himself had said that he didn’t want her apologies for the way she was. So it didn’t seem fair to apply the same supposed to’s to him, either.

 

She’d said she was sorry that she didn’t look like Ann. He’d want more with her if she looked like Ann, she’d said, and he’d kissed her cheek and denied it. She’d said she was sorry that she didn’t know how to act sexy, and he’d agreed, though not in the same words she’d used. But then he’d just held her close. Like he’d hoped he could make it make sense to her if he just kept his hands on her.

 

He’d stared at her, that unflinching eye contact that she could just barely stand, and he’d convinced her to take off all of her clothing with him for the very first time. But that was it. That was all there’d been, nothing else. They’d slept like that in his hard, narrow dorm bed, wrapped up in each other, and she’d felt so confused that she’d laid awake long after he’d fallen asleep, her face pressed to his bare chest.

 

Time helped, and so did talking. A lot of ‘is this okay’ and ‘tell me if you need to stop’ from each of them, and some adjusted expectations. A lot of googling, and when she’d figured out the right combination of things to type in, that had helped, too. Having the words.

 

They never did get to where they were _supposed to_ be. But that was okay. It worked anyway.

 

She thought about his offer carefully. Whether he was up for it depended on the day, and she usually leapt at the chance to be close to him like this. To see him this way, too, because his face changed on the days he wanted to. He’d put that laserbeam focus on her again, but in a way she didn’t mind, as long as he was moving his hand or his mouth at the same time. It felt sort of flattering to be looked at like one of his paintings, and if it got to be too much, she could just close her eyes.

 

He’d asked her if she wanted his help, and it was tempting. If she said yes, she knew from experience that she would finally get the break from her brain that she craved so badly. For a little while, at least. No noise, no torture loop. Just the sound of him breathing in her ear until he finished her, patient to the very end.

 

But the back of her mind had already decided for her. They’d come a long way, both of them, but there were still things he didn’t get about her, and the thought of explaining the fact that she’d probably cry during, or that she’d _definitely_ cry after, was enough to make her not want it at all. Seeing it had upset him, the last time that he’d visited her on a day like this, because he didn’t get that it was just… byproduct. Like exhaust from a car.

 

When she got like this, the tears came out no matter how good he’d made her feel - in fact, she sometimes thought that a good one got out more of the tears. Wet up top and down below too, heh heh heh. But he’d been nice to her today, and picturing the way his face had gotten all creased up the last time he’d seen her cry during made her give up on the whole idea.

 

She liked it, though. She’d have to make sure to explain it to him when she was feeling a bit more steady on her feet, so she could take him up on it next time.

 

It was the thought that counted, anyway, especially with him. He didn’t get what she got out of it and never would, but the fact that he really would have done it just to help her made her feel as though he had. She sniffled and smiled at him in the dark. “Nah. I mean, it does help, sometimes. Usually. But, uh. I don’t feel like it today. This is good.”

 

It was nothing but the truth. Talking about their dream was good. Talking about old times was good. Even just making dumb dirty jokes that he would never, ever laugh at was good. She felt a lot better.

 

She ducked her head and tucked it beneath his chin. Her bed was just as narrow as his dorm room bed was, so he had to wrap her up tight with his arms and legs to keep her from falling out.

 

It got late, but he didn’t leave. He heard her belly growl, and offered her something to eat.

 

“I don’t want any,” she mumbled, her mantra, until she realized what he’d heard and had to adjust her argument. “What would you even feed me, anyway - ”

 

“I have a package of ramen for you in my school bag,” he said, and he said it _proudly._ He’d taken a brick of his shitty, 80 yen, discount instant ramen from his precious dorm room stash and he’d brought it all the way across town for her like a _prize,_ and he was offering it to _her,_ Futaba _Sakura,_ as if she didn’t have a fridge full of leftover curry that she could nuke whenever she wanted, or a cafe down the street that she could mooch fresh curry from any day of the week, or a dad who would be home in a couple hours to make her just about anything she could possibly ask for -

 

She laughed against his flat, bare chest and remembered what the ramen had tasted like last time. “Maybe if you make it plain. Just the flavour it comes with, I mean. No weird additions this time.” Then she jerked her body out straight from his in surprise. “Hey, you said you didn’t bring me anything! Before.”

 

“I was considering saving the ramen for myself,” he admitted, and this time she laughed with enough force to slither out of bed and onto the floor.

 

God, it felt good to laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> I did my best to tag this thoroughly, but please let me know if I missed something important!
> 
> I yell about P5 on twitter here: https://twitter.com/araforreal


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